Thursday Food News — Edition #3
Welcome to our third Thursday Food News!
Every Thursday we share articles about what’s new in the food industry, from the new shiny delivery startups to what we could eat 50 years from now.
The CIA and MIT Media Lab Honor 8 Disruptive Food Startups at reThink Food 2016
In today’s ever-accelerating markets, there is often little time for new ideas to gain traction.
The struggle to break through the noise of entrenched market trends and first movers is real–and often a distraction from doing the important work of rethinking our food system.
At The Culinary Institute of America, they’re committed to nurturing creativity and honing the skills of the next generation of chefs and culinary advancement, which is why they are constantly looking for ways to support and promote innovation in the technology, cultivation and production of food.
Open Sourcing Food Entrepreneurship
In nature, the more species there are in a system, the more diverse and strong that system becomes. The system evolves with diversity, as preferred gene variants improve species and the system as a whole.
Conversely, problems happen when the system becomes too concentrated and a monoculture forms. The system becomes one-dimensional and is susceptible to disease and other threats.
The value of diversity is certainly true in nature, but is equally important in industries like food. Problems arise when the number of people creating products is concentrated to a few players.
This dynamic has been shifting for the past decade though, as legions of new, small food brands are coming up for their share of the market.
The Next Hot Trends in Food
Not too far in the future, when you reach for a healthy drink, it might be full of water from a cactus.
Your main course at dinner might be a pear-like fruit from Southeast Asia that does a remarkable job of imitating meat. The next candy bar your children bite into might be infused with mushrooms that help cut down on the sugar needed to sweeten the treat. And their breakfast cereal might be colored with algae instead of chemicals.
Why the wave of exotic delights? Nutrition science — and customers’ rapidly changing tastes — are forcing the food business to search ever farther afield for new edibles.
EatFirst is creating the first ‘online-only’ restaurant to disrupt the food delivery sector
EatFirst is aiming to disrupt the food delivery sector with the launch of what it claims is the first online-only restaurant.
It has its own chefs, kitchens and menus, delivering its food to hungry customers that can only order via the internet. It does work with partners such as Just Eat and Amazon Restaurants but that is just to expand its reach.
International Food Leaders Race To Go Beyond Meat
Tyson Foods, the world’s largest processor of beef, chicken and pork, helps fill two out of five dinner plates in America every day.
With that level of market domination, you wouldn’t expect them to pivot to an entirely different direction from their core business.
Yet, that’s exactly what happened last week when they took a 5% stake in plant-based pioneer Beyond Meat.
Can Craft Butcher Shops Help Transform the Meat Industry?
For a long time, Americans bought their meat at neighborhood butcher shops, but over the past several decades, most of those shops have disappeared as ground beef and boneless, skinless chicken breasts have become cheap commodities that shoppers can toss in their carts at the supermarket.
Now, a new breed of butcher shops are making a comeback. These shops generally prioritize buying whole animals from local, pasture-based farms and free-range poultry.
The Most Successful Agtech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of
Agworld, a farm management software company out of Western Australia, has been on the agtech scene since 2012 and has raised over $11 million.
The company has also expanded internationally to reach 65 million acres under management for paid users across Australia, New Zealand, the US, South Africa, and South America.
But even if you’ve been paying attention to agtech, it’s possible you might not have heard of Agworld. Why have they decided to stay off the radar, and what can others learn from their journey?
You’ll soon be able to order food through Facebook
Don’t Poke your dinner.
Facebook announced a slew of new features that allow users to get advice from friends on things to do in their cities and upcoming events.
But it also introduced new ways to avoid talking to other humans: You can now book movie tickets, make appointments, and order food from the Facebook pages of US businesses.
How Rotterdam is pioneering a food revolution
Climate change, global urbanisation, and increasing migration are just a few of the many issues putting stress on food systems.
Rotterdam is proactive in planning for a future where the city will have to re-shape its supply and demand for produce.
Farm to robot to table: Inside the food industry’s high-tech future
The next time you open the door to find the pizza you ordered (via an app of course), you may not find a delivery person standing on your doorstep.
Expect to see a drone dropping off your dinner. And perhaps that dinner was by prepped, at least in part, by robots. Eventually, some of your pizza’s toppings may be lab grown– but in the meantime, even those fresh-off-the-farm ingredients have a good chance of reaching your fork via robotics.
Today, automation is shaping up to be our generation’s food revolution.
